16-letter words containing a, c, i, s
- visual interface — (tool, text) (vi) /V-I/, /vi:/, *never* /siks/ A screen editor crufted together by Bill Joy for an early BSD release. vi became the de facto standard Unix editor and a nearly undisputed hacker favourite outside of MIT until the rise of Emacs after about 1984. It tends to frustrate new users no end, as it will neither take commands while expecting input text nor vice versa, and the default setup provides no indication of which mode the editor is in (one correspondent accordingly reports that he has often heard the editor's name pronounced /vi:l/). Nevertheless it is still widely used (about half the respondents in a 1991 Usenet poll preferred it), and even some Emacs fans resort to it as a mail editor and for small editing jobs (mainly because it starts up faster than the bulkier versions of Emacs). See holy wars.
- vital statistics — The vital statistics of a population are statistics such as the number of births, deaths, or marriages which take place in it.
- vitruvian scroll — a scroll forming a stylized wave pattern.
- walking distance — distance that can easily be walked
- war of secession — American Civil War.
- ward christensen — (person) The inventor of XMODEM and of the BBS. Ward did physics in college and programmed mainframes for IBM. Ward and friend Randy Suess set up their BBS on first on 1978-02-16 in Chicago. It ran on an S-100 computer with 64k RAM and two single-sided 8" 250kB diskettes.
- washington, d. c — Booker T(aliaferro) [boo k-er tol-uh-ver] /ˈbʊk ər ˈtɒl ə vər/ (Show IPA), 1856–1915, U.S. reformer, educator, author, and lecturer.
- washington, d.c. — Booker T(aliaferro) [boo k-er tol-uh-ver] /ˈbʊk ər ˈtɒl ə vər/ (Show IPA), 1856–1915, U.S. reformer, educator, author, and lecturer.
- watch this space — Journalists write 'Watch this space' in order to indicate in an informal way that they will be giving more information about something in the future.
- welfare services — services that provide help with people's living conditions and financial problems
- west valley city — city in NC Utah, near Salt Lake City: pop. 109,000
- western sandwich — a sandwich with a western omelet for a filling.
- whatchamacallits — Plural form of whatchamacallit.
- wild goose chase — a wild or absurd search for something nonexistent or unobtainable: a wild-goose chase looking for a building long demolished.
- wild-goose chase — a wild or absurd search for something nonexistent or unobtainable: a wild-goose chase looking for a building long demolished.
- wisconsin rapids — a city in central Wisconsin.
- witches' sabbath — Sabbat.
- with clean hands — innocently
- word association — stimulation of an associative pattern by a word.
- yah-boo politics — adversarial politics in which politicians constantly deride their opponents and dismiss everything suggested by them
- yeoman's service — good, useful, or workmanlike service: His trusty sword did him yeoman's service.
- ziegler catalyst — any of a group of catalysts, such as titanium trichloride (TiCl3) and aluminium alkyl (Al(CH3)3), that produce stereospecific polymers